Normal & Flashpoint articles
A trio of articles. Two about Normal and one about Canadian shows that have been picked up by US networks. Both Paul and Hugh get a mention.
Vancouver Event: Special Screening of Carl Bessais Normal
2008-02-06 22:36:05 by Marina Antunes in Row Three
Admission: I only know Carl Bessai’s work by reputation but it’s a pretty reputable reputation and from the looks of his new film, it’s also well deserved.
Normal, which stars Carrie-Anne Moss, Kevin Zegers and Callum Keith Rennie, focuses on a group of unrelated people and how they deal with the emotional fallout of a deadly car accident. The trailer looks quite good and I’ve been really impressed with Moss’ choices since her Hollywood breakout in the The Matrix films and she seems to be continuing her upswing trend here. Add in the great Rennie (who many may recognize as a familiar face from many a Canadian production) and you’ve got the makings of a winner.
The film opens in Toronto and Vancouver on February 8th and Vancouverites will be privy to a very special event. The First Weekend Club has put together a special live Talkback with Carl Bessai and members of the cast on Saturday, February 9th at Tinseltown following the 1:30PM screening. You can purchase your tickets for the film in advance (highly recommended), via Cinemark.
The After the Credits crew will be in attendance and bringing you all the juicy details early next week.
TV REVIEW: STIFLING A CANCON YAWN
BARRETT HOOPER
So the Hollywood writers’ strike has amounted to little more than a bit of media-produced sound and fury signifying not much of anything. A deal with producers is expected by next week, we’re told, and TV and film production gears up shortly thereafter.
The only immediate effect is that the three-hour, 47-minute celebrity snoozathon known as the Oscars will go off as usual on February 24.
The great migration of Canadian content to American networks never materialized. Only three shows - three! - earned export deals. CBS has agreed to carry 13 episodes of Flashpoint, a CTV-produced cop drama set in Toronto and starring Hugh Dillon.
It’ll likely be the first to air, making it the first Canadian series since Paul Gross played a red-serged Dudley Do-Right on Due South to broadcast in prime time on both sides of the border.
NBC has nabbed CTV’s psychic paramedic series, The Listener, for which Clement Virgo (The Wire) has helmed the pilot. And ABC Family ordered 13 episodes of CBC single-mom dramedy Sophie.
Stretching the Cancon quotient a bit, Oscar winner Paul Haggis is developing his race drama Crash as a series for U.S. cable network Starz.
Speaking of Canadian programming, jPod has been getting a lot of undeserved attention. Seems we’re only too quick to applaud anything homegrown.
The series is based on the Douglas Coupland bestseller (Coupland’s one of the producers) about a bunch of software developers, aka World-of-Warcraft-playing, Red Bull-chugging, porn-surfing computer nerds, socially malnourished types who make video games for a living. You know the kind - they converse in a tiresome ironic-for-irony’s-sake form of geekspeak, full of technobabble and pop culture references, that’s only amusing to themselves.
Problem is, unless you’re one of them, you’d probably have no interest in hanging out with them, much less in watching a show about them, especially when that show thinks it’s smarter than it really is.
Even more absurd is how, shoehorned in amongst jPod’s lovelorn smart alecks, are a suburban mom with a basement grow op and - completely out of left field - Alan Thicke as middle-aged construction worker who becomes an actor, landing roles as Hitler’s cat doctor (it’s too atro-ciously unfunny to describe) and cartoon voice-over work.
It’s hard to chalk any of this mess up to growing pains.
Vancouver filmmaker Carl Bessai strives for a Normal balance
February 7, 2008
Vancouver filmmaker Carl Bessai strives for a Normal balance
By Ken Eisner
Vancouver filmmaker Carl Bessai makes dark studies of people under pressure. In original, small-scale efforts like Johnny, Lola, and Emile, a few characters battle for their identities, often in claustrophobic circumstances. His latest feature, Normal, boasts his largest cast and most varied emotional palette, and it was written by someone else. But it still smacks of his trademark obsession with guilt, redemption, and the frailty of human connections.
Carrie-Anne Moss headlines the impressive ensemble as a suburban mother grieving the loss of her beloved teenage son. In the tale, filmed on southern Vancouver Island and opening here Friday (February 8), Callum Keith Rennie and Tygh Runyan are brothers who were also in the fatal accident. Michael Riley and Kevin Zegers are a father and son likewise involved.
"It’s a pretty heavy subject," Bessai admits when reached by cellphone on the set of a new project. "The original idea came from this young guy, Travis McDonald, who had actually watched his friend die, and that terrible experience motivated him to write this script.
"The challenge to me was to balance all these interconnected stories, done in this fragmented style that I guess we associate with Robert Altman’s films. I tried to balance the basic sadness of Carrie-Anne’s story with some of the quirkiness that comes from Callum and Tygh, who get into some goofier stuff."
Local producers at Brightlight Pictures optioned the script a few years back, and Bessai was eventually hired to bring it to the screen. After working with Ian McKellen in Emile, largely shot in Victoria, he was able to attract Moss and rising star Zegers to this one.
The veteran director, born in Edmonton and schooled in Toronto, previously wrote Severed, an environmental horror film, with McDonald, and he also contributed to the script of the ghost chiller They Wait, which recently opened in Vancouver. Between the family-secret melodramas and bloody cleavers to the head, Bessai confesses that it might be time for him to make a comedy.
He is, indeed, mixing them up with Mothers and Daughters, a collaborative, mostly improvised piece centring on Gabrielle Rose, Babz Chula, and Tantoo Cardinal. (Cardinal also starred in his Unnatural and Accidental, an adapted play briefly seen last year.)
"Certainly, this new thing is a lot lighter," he says with a relieved-sounding chuckle as crew members rattle lunch utensils in the background. "I won this prize [Citytv Western Canada Feature Film Award] for Normal at last year’s VIFF. It was 12,000 bucks, so, like a good farmer, I thought I’d put that seed back in the ground and see what grows."
To that end, he’s abandoning much of the measured, carefully crafted, and highly stylized visual approach that has marked his previous work.
"It was three months of workshopping and now we’re in a 10-day guerrilla shoot. It’s three stories about these crazy women and their daughters.
"Hopefully," he deadpans, "the laughs will be intentional."
Vancouver Event: Special Screening of Carl Bessais Normal
2008-02-06 22:36:05 by Marina Antunes in Row Three
Admission: I only know Carl Bessai’s work by reputation but it’s a pretty reputable reputation and from the looks of his new film, it’s also well deserved.
Normal, which stars Carrie-Anne Moss, Kevin Zegers and Callum Keith Rennie, focuses on a group of unrelated people and how they deal with the emotional fallout of a deadly car accident. The trailer looks quite good and I’ve been really impressed with Moss’ choices since her Hollywood breakout in the The Matrix films and she seems to be continuing her upswing trend here. Add in the great Rennie (who many may recognize as a familiar face from many a Canadian production) and you’ve got the makings of a winner.
The film opens in Toronto and Vancouver on February 8th and Vancouverites will be privy to a very special event. The First Weekend Club has put together a special live Talkback with Carl Bessai and members of the cast on Saturday, February 9th at Tinseltown following the 1:30PM screening. You can purchase your tickets for the film in advance (highly recommended), via Cinemark.
The After the Credits crew will be in attendance and bringing you all the juicy details early next week.
TV REVIEW: STIFLING A CANCON YAWN
BARRETT HOOPER
So the Hollywood writers’ strike has amounted to little more than a bit of media-produced sound and fury signifying not much of anything. A deal with producers is expected by next week, we’re told, and TV and film production gears up shortly thereafter.
The only immediate effect is that the three-hour, 47-minute celebrity snoozathon known as the Oscars will go off as usual on February 24.
The great migration of Canadian content to American networks never materialized. Only three shows - three! - earned export deals. CBS has agreed to carry 13 episodes of Flashpoint, a CTV-produced cop drama set in Toronto and starring Hugh Dillon.
It’ll likely be the first to air, making it the first Canadian series since Paul Gross played a red-serged Dudley Do-Right on Due South to broadcast in prime time on both sides of the border.
NBC has nabbed CTV’s psychic paramedic series, The Listener, for which Clement Virgo (The Wire) has helmed the pilot. And ABC Family ordered 13 episodes of CBC single-mom dramedy Sophie.
Stretching the Cancon quotient a bit, Oscar winner Paul Haggis is developing his race drama Crash as a series for U.S. cable network Starz.
Speaking of Canadian programming, jPod has been getting a lot of undeserved attention. Seems we’re only too quick to applaud anything homegrown.
The series is based on the Douglas Coupland bestseller (Coupland’s one of the producers) about a bunch of software developers, aka World-of-Warcraft-playing, Red Bull-chugging, porn-surfing computer nerds, socially malnourished types who make video games for a living. You know the kind - they converse in a tiresome ironic-for-irony’s-sake form of geekspeak, full of technobabble and pop culture references, that’s only amusing to themselves.
Problem is, unless you’re one of them, you’d probably have no interest in hanging out with them, much less in watching a show about them, especially when that show thinks it’s smarter than it really is.
Even more absurd is how, shoehorned in amongst jPod’s lovelorn smart alecks, are a suburban mom with a basement grow op and - completely out of left field - Alan Thicke as middle-aged construction worker who becomes an actor, landing roles as Hitler’s cat doctor (it’s too atro-ciously unfunny to describe) and cartoon voice-over work.
It’s hard to chalk any of this mess up to growing pains.
Vancouver filmmaker Carl Bessai strives for a Normal balance
February 7, 2008
Vancouver filmmaker Carl Bessai strives for a Normal balance
By Ken Eisner
Vancouver filmmaker Carl Bessai makes dark studies of people under pressure. In original, small-scale efforts like Johnny, Lola, and Emile, a few characters battle for their identities, often in claustrophobic circumstances. His latest feature, Normal, boasts his largest cast and most varied emotional palette, and it was written by someone else. But it still smacks of his trademark obsession with guilt, redemption, and the frailty of human connections.
Carrie-Anne Moss headlines the impressive ensemble as a suburban mother grieving the loss of her beloved teenage son. In the tale, filmed on southern Vancouver Island and opening here Friday (February 8), Callum Keith Rennie and Tygh Runyan are brothers who were also in the fatal accident. Michael Riley and Kevin Zegers are a father and son likewise involved.
"It’s a pretty heavy subject," Bessai admits when reached by cellphone on the set of a new project. "The original idea came from this young guy, Travis McDonald, who had actually watched his friend die, and that terrible experience motivated him to write this script.
"The challenge to me was to balance all these interconnected stories, done in this fragmented style that I guess we associate with Robert Altman’s films. I tried to balance the basic sadness of Carrie-Anne’s story with some of the quirkiness that comes from Callum and Tygh, who get into some goofier stuff."
Local producers at Brightlight Pictures optioned the script a few years back, and Bessai was eventually hired to bring it to the screen. After working with Ian McKellen in Emile, largely shot in Victoria, he was able to attract Moss and rising star Zegers to this one.
The veteran director, born in Edmonton and schooled in Toronto, previously wrote Severed, an environmental horror film, with McDonald, and he also contributed to the script of the ghost chiller They Wait, which recently opened in Vancouver. Between the family-secret melodramas and bloody cleavers to the head, Bessai confesses that it might be time for him to make a comedy.
He is, indeed, mixing them up with Mothers and Daughters, a collaborative, mostly improvised piece centring on Gabrielle Rose, Babz Chula, and Tantoo Cardinal. (Cardinal also starred in his Unnatural and Accidental, an adapted play briefly seen last year.)
"Certainly, this new thing is a lot lighter," he says with a relieved-sounding chuckle as crew members rattle lunch utensils in the background. "I won this prize [Citytv Western Canada Feature Film Award] for Normal at last year’s VIFF. It was 12,000 bucks, so, like a good farmer, I thought I’d put that seed back in the ground and see what grows."
To that end, he’s abandoning much of the measured, carefully crafted, and highly stylized visual approach that has marked his previous work.
"It was three months of workshopping and now we’re in a 10-day guerrilla shoot. It’s three stories about these crazy women and their daughters.
"Hopefully," he deadpans, "the laughs will be intentional."